I think it is true, re: not being able to go back to the past, but that doesn't mean it's not legitimate or even got roots in terms of Magisterial Protestantism. I myself just came back from a trip to Southwest Texas, where the main options are a bunch of Baptist or Charismatic Churches, Methodists or PCUSA, and a few Catholic churches. For conservative protestants, there's an Anglo-Catholic ACNA church and an LCMS. There's nothing at all for infant baptizing Reformed Protestants that's not a 3 hour drive, so I understand where East is coming from.
However, I disagree with the notion that something can't faithfully express a tradition, even if it's not able to be fully authentic to it due to loss of institutional knowledge. In the context of the church, I'd even more vociferously disagree with the idea that mere chronological heritage alone makes someone a more true bearer of that tradition than a convert trying to seriously incorporate the teachings and history of the past in the present. The deadness of mere traditionalism cannot be underestimated.
In some ways, perhaps profound or perhaps trivial, it's a bit like the difference between someone who visits a country and then brings back a few recipes and opens a restaurant with "authentic" XYZ cuisine vs. someone who intensely studies the cuisine and seeks to translate it for the world more broadly.
With authentic Mexican cooking, the gold standard for authenticity from a foreigner is Diana Kennedy, a British woman whose husband was a diplomat I believe and who stayed in the country after he died. She intensely studied and promoted traditional techniques, ingredients, and methods of cooking. She was also intensely critical of what I'd say the silver approach is of applying traditional ingredients and methods in a modern context.
I'd say the silver standard is someone like Rick Bayless who has a masters degree in linguistics, spent extensive time in Mexico and also tries to incorporate traditional techniques, ingredients and methods, while innovating and using modern or different cooking tools. His work is definitely closer to "appropriation" than Kennedy's but I think still seeks to honor and respect the background, in a way that's recognizable to the original tradition.
In the church context, I think it's accurate to say Kennedy is fairly impossible and closer to the bad kind of LARPing if someone imitates it in church. I think the silver approach is quite legitimate and faithful to both the spirit and letter of the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the Reformation. Just because we can't go back and wouldn't want to go back in terms of living conditions doesn't mean you can't have a faithful expression of the Lutheran or Reformed tradition by an outsider coming in. Publishers are routinely opening up the library of the past by translating or reprinting works from history, and whether someone's a cradle believer or new believer in a particular tradition, they're received with JOY. I witnessed this myself with both cradle and new believers being delighted when Herman Bavinck's works got translated in the early 2000s. For many, it was like opening an entire wing of a house that's been inherited.
In the church context, I really do not understand the dismissal or outright contempt towards those not of a Reformational tradition who are trying to recover what's been lost, especially when so many of the mainline institutions pay lipservice to their heritage while ripping it to shreds through rank unbelief. Throughout Scripture, outsiders who turn to true faith are praised, whether it's Rahab or Ruth, Gentiles and Eunuchs in Isaiah, the Centurion, Syrophoenician woman, or countless others, while the ultra-particular but spiritually empty traditionalists are frequently called things like whitewashed tombs.
I have a lot to say on this issue having been involved at politics at the local level for a long time and hope to make the zoom call. Here I'll just say that Greer is off in a big way because he assumes the only tax is property tax. There is a huge varieties of ways to tax people and the evils of the property tax don't make it one of the best.
Just because Libertarianism is not of the Left does not mean it belongs to the Right. There are many ways to be stupid and Libertarianism is one of them.
One of the reasons the Right has failed for so long has been because of the assumption that world operates as a dichotomy, and that those opposed to the Left must be therefore of the Right.
The core problem for the Right has been setting the limits of membership. Until this issue is resolved we'll continue to be undermined from the inside.
The sort of forced co-habitation of libertarianism and conservatism has been a persistent source of conflict since the founding of the postwar conservative movement.
It's silly to me to think libertarianism has any appreciable influence over actual governance, particularly at the federal level. Republicans made their peace with the New Deal and trillion dollar deficits.
I'm also not sure why it's considered "libertarian" to simply not want to pay taxes but also want to receive government benefits.
I was a cradle Catholic. I never read the Bible, didn't feel particularly close to God, believed that if I left the Catholic church I was going to hell. I was educated by nuns who were more interested in telling us how bad sex was (in both senses of the word "bad") than instilling in us (girls) respect for our bodies and our own bodily autonomy (i.e., help in telling our boyfriends "no." Turns out sex wasn't bad, it was enjoyable.) The meme about boys wanting to date Catholic girls was not a joke.
I left the Catholic Church when I got married. We didn't go to any church until one day (after we had been married about 6 or 7 years) some Mormon missionaries knocked on our door. My husband insisted we join, implying that our difficult marriage would end if we didn't join. The Mormons told me that the Catholic Church was no longer God's religion because of apostasy and that the Protestants didn't have a leg to stand on because they had broken away from God's religion and that Jesus had also come to the Americas before he ascended heaven and that Joseph Smith found golden plates that proved that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was now God's religion. My marriage fell apart and I left the Mormon (LDS) church.
A number of years later my son was attending a Presbyterian Church (the liberal branch) and so wanting to go back to church, I went there. It was good place to be, but I wasn't really looking for God, I was looking to belong somewhere.
So, I've run the gamut. I've been exploring a small evangelical church near me and will likely join it. In order to join, I needed to attend 8 classes in which they explain in detail exactly what they are and what they believe and how it affects what they are as a church. They get right down to the basics in the Bible and don't embellish it with other claims to righteousness or authenticity. They don't try to tell me that I must belong to this specific church or denomination in order to go to heaven, they teach me about God's love and Jesus's sacrifice and that I need to acknowledge Jesus as my Lord and Savior in order to go to heaven. They are not claiming a direct line from Peter, but they are basing their church on the those created by Jesus's disciples following that example.
Yes, their services are a bunch of hymns played by a piano and guitars, a pastor in blue jeans and things projected on the wall. But when I watch the congregants, I see people who are clearly engaged, who are clearly feeling in touch with God. Would I like a little Rock of Ages? Sure, but I can play that at home.
For the first time, I'm working on an actual relationship with God and Jesus, rather than on whether I am attending the church claiming the best credentials. It's early days, but I already feel as if this might be the church for me. Somehow I feel like this might be what it was like in the early days with the Apostles.
Ohio is expected to have a property tax referendum soon. Some of my property taxes pay for libraries and parks, things I use a lot and appreciate. At the same time, nearly 2/3rds of my property taxes go to my school district. Another nearly 20% of my property taxes goes to four different social service agencies that serve seniors, children, disabled, and addicted individuals. Inevitably, that will bring more scrutiny for school districts and social service agencies.
With this setup, there is concern among local elected officials of “levy fatigue.” The recipients of our property taxes dollars, school districts especially, need to reexamine their relationships with the taxpayers. The arrogance and we can do whatever attitude has to stop. If it doesn’t, the hammer might come down in a referendum.
Re: donor intent
Interesting to read. I do hear horror stories of what we would call ruling from the grave. However, this might be something looked at for future donors to keep resources out of the hands of folks who don’t have their interest in mind. We’ve seen foundations taken over years later and led to other avenues. In a few cases, non-profits have arguably done acts in a political interest. It would not be surprising to see state attorneys general and local judges pressured to take a closer look at these setups.
I don't see why you say a new nondenominational church cannot go back to being traditional. If some people start using the old Church of England liturgy, traditional hymns, etc., what are they lacking? Why do they have to have a pastor-- one person out of 100-- who has gone to a C of E seminary which by now is entirely heretical anyway?
Traditions are living things. We can't truly go back to living like they did in the medieval era, or in Greece or Rome. There can be a creative encounter with the past à la the Renaissance, but it's not the original article
I sometimes attend an evangelical Anglican church that is very "low" in its general style (drums and guitars, Hillsong-type music with words projected on screens, pastor in jeans, even little plastic cups of what looks suspiciously like cranberry juice at Communion (though I don't commune there). Until recently, you could honestly have attended there for months and not realised you were in an Anglican church. Now, though, the pastor is preaching through the Thirty-Nine Articles, one Article a week. It seems to me a hopeful sign of the church rediscovering its identity.
1. The Amy Grant "steeple-jacking" story is interesting and great validation of the donor intent strategy. I wonder how common this is; not something I've given much thought to compared to Mainline liberalization. This sort of steeple-jacking would be an argument against congregational polity, I suppose. When I saw Grant's name, I thought she would be the villain of the story. But there are other family members involved; hopefully the church will be orthodox. That's potentially an excellent piece of real estate for a faithful Protestant church. The Catholic Cathedral of the Incarnation is nearby in downtown/midtown Nashville and is a beautiful building that I would recommend even fellow Protestant visitors to Nashville take a look at.
2. Protestant LARPING - I'm receptive to some of the arguments about excarnated Christianity, particularly when they touch on something like EO that is so steeped in tradition. But a part of me thinks that this is less of an issue with the Reformed traditions. I'm also reminded that, even in the text of the Bible, I can think of two "LARPing" moments where Scripture was needed to recover a mostly or entirely lost tradition: once under Hezekiah, and once in Nehemiah.
There might yet be a future for more liturgical and denominational forms of Protestantism, though they might also not look like those forms of the past, which were influenced by a living tradition connected to Roman Catholicism that is now fully severed for the vast majority of the world's Protestants.
3. Property Taxes - Greer brings up some good points, though what's missing from this conversation is that property taxes are also, objectively, far more economically efficient than income taxes. This country was built on yeomanry, which allowed for far more rapid population growth than the vast feudal estates of Europe, even in places like Spain during the Reconquista. Property taxes are how you break up the modern-day equivalent of those estates, and it continues to be a way to promote family formation by making starter homes affordable for young families. Texas, famously, has no state income tax and relatively high property taxes, and this has enabled the booming affordability of metros like Dallas. I'm not quite sure how DeSantis intends to fund Florida without property OR income taxes.
2. Protestant LARPING - I'm receptive to some of the arguments about excarnated Christianity, particularly when they touch on something like EO that is so steeped in tradition. But a part of me thinks that this is less of an issue with the Reformed traditions. I'm also reminded that, even in the text of the Bible, I can think of two "LARPing" moments where Scripture was needed to recover a mostly or entirely lost tradition: once under Hezekiah, and once in Nehemiah.
There might yet be a future for more liturgical and denominational forms of Protestantism, though they might also not look like those forms of the past, which were influenced by a living tradition connected to Roman Catholicism that is now fully severed for the vast majority of the world's Protestants.
----
[This paragraph relates to American groups.] Ironically, I think Anglicanism is both the biggest and most inherently unstable because it's such a big tent and doesn't have binding confessional documents (at least in practice). American Confessional Lutheranism is currently hitting major demographic declines, but I would not be surprised if Jordan Cooper ends up being either/both the Lutheran R.C. Sproul or Ian Murray (founder of Banner of Truth) and there ends up being a major boost in confessional Lutheranism over the coming decades. The conservative Presbyterian circles I'm most familiar with are generally growing, with both transfer/sorting growth as well as converts. The young to early middle are tending to be more confessional than the older in these circles at the moment.
In their classical forms, all three branches have major foundational points of unity where one can build a serious and recognizable Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed/Presbyterian congregation based on broadly-held texts across centuries and cultures. The thing about a confessional church is that the shared confession is what builds the unity across cultures and where it's healthiest, it's equally as welcoming to the outsider seeking to learn as it is to the cradle believer. It bridges demographics, nationalities, class, and a lot of other things. Something else I'd add is that they're often heavily lay-driven, just as Latin mass is for the Catholics.
Especially if Prayer Book or Reformational Anglicans went about it, the first Anglican Church of the Moon could be established with a Bible and a 1662 Prayer Book. That's all that's necessary to have a vibrant and recognizably Anglican church. For Lutherans, Bible + Book of Concord + a Hymnbook and/or Luther's Church Order would do nicely with just the Bible & Book of Concord being sufficient to start. For Presbyterians or Reformed either the Westminster Standards or Three Forms of Unity, a Psalter or Psalter Hymnal, and either the Directory for Worship or the Dutch Book of Church Order would set up a recognizable and serious Church that would be a faithful representative. As with the Lutherans, a set of Confessional Standards + a BCO/DPW is sufficient. Someone might have to figure out how to chant or come up with metrical psalms and hymns but that would just be culturally different and not fundamentally unrecognizable. The Anglicans only need 2 because the Prayer Book also includes ordination rites and the confession of faith & catechism.
Different types of taxes tax different kinds of wealth. Since not everyone (or every state) has the same types of wealth, it makes sense to tax different kinds of wealth differently.
Income taxes tax income. Capital gains taxes tax investment gains. (Realized investment gains could be taxed as either income or capital gain.) Property taxes, obviously, tax the value of property. Sales taxes tax consumption. In addition, there are user fees (such as automobile licenses).
In my state of Wisconsin, only local governments are permitted to tax property and only the state is permitted to tax income. Both the state and municipalities are permitted to impose sales taxes.
From a local standpoint, it makes sense to tax property because the services the property tax pays for are local: fire and police departments, municipal government, public schools, etc.
Again, in Wisconsin, the state shares in the cost of public schools and provides some aid to municipal governments, and there is an income tax deduction for part of the property taxes paid.
Taxes may be regressive (that is, poorer people pay more than their share; however that is defined), progressive (that is richer people pay more than their share); or neutral.
Most income taxes are progressive; that is, the percent of income that is taxed increases the higher the income. Property taxes are often considered to be regressive, for the reason stated in the some of the above comments: property values may increase out of proportion to the income of the owner and the owner is subject to taxes paid on unrealized gains. Sales taxes are generally considered to be regressive (a point on which I disagree) unless they have some exemptions, such as for food or medicine.
I do not consider that sales taxes are as regressive as they are blamed for two reasons: first, there is a degree of choice in paying sales taxes, the more you buy the more you pay and vice versa; and second, people at different income levels tend to purchase lower or higher cost things. For example, while people of all income levels buy TVs, people with more money are presumed to buy more expensive ones, thus paying more sales taxes.
Whatever kind of taxes are levied must have a tax base. Going back to property taxes, Wisconsin is a tourist state and a significant amount property is owned by out of state owners who pay property taxes to Wisconsin municipalities. That is good for the municipalities. However, that also raises property values which can result in problems for Wisconsin residents who own property in those municipalities.
There is no inherently "good" tax or "bad" tax. Only good or bad tax policy.
>There is no inherently "good" tax or "bad" tax. Only good or bad tax policy.
This is true to a point. The platonic ideal of the worst possible income tax isn't that different from the platonic ideal of the worst possible property tax. At some level, any sufficiently poorly-designed tax is confiscatory and it doesn't make much difference whether income, spending, or property is being confiscated wholesale. All of those represent the state declaring total war against the productive economy.
But if we're talking about well-designed taxes, or, perhaps more importantly, actual taxes in practice in the real world, income taxes (especially corporate income taxes) are the worst for growth, and property taxes are the best. Consumption taxes somewhere in between.
See e.g. here, but I think it's confirmed in basically every major analysis, even if some of the rankings in the middle shift.
Property taxes can be quite villainous. Someone works their whole life, buys a house, the valuation raises steeply enough they’re forced out of it. Who can plan on a fluctuating tax?
Texas incidentally is not a good example. I have relatives there that are always fighting new valuations. The affordability you mention is also frequently way worse than it used to be. We’re not breaking up latifundia here we’re forcing the elderly out in the name of progress.
Not to mention do we even have the right? Sales taxes make the most sense to me. The state provides a stable safe environment to conduct your economic life so it takes a cut. If you must have property taxes, at least peg them to the original purchase price, that enables homeowners to plan.
As Christians I think we need to be VERY careful about any taxation scheme that could in practice result in seizing someone’s land or home.
In both cases you are referring to unrealized gains. Worse yet, in the scenario to which you are responding ("Someone works their whole life, buys a house, the valuation raises steeply enough they’re forced out of it") there is no increase in *real* value, in *real* utility; it's just too many others with dollars/whatever competing for the same types of property, and the further result that should be appended to "forced out of it" is "you end up living somewhere much less real utility and real value."
The gains are unrealized, but as I pointed out, you can access those gains in advance through finance. If you do the math, you should come out far ahead in any realistic scenario of rapid home appreciation, assuming typical HELOC rates and assuming the range of property taxes that exist in the US (<2.0%).
I acknowledge there's an element here that's unfair, but that's also the nature of property ownership. You can't freeze time. You can't freeze a place in the state you bought into it.
Meanwhile many people buy homes in communities that fall into blight and decay, causing their home equity to be destroyed, which is a lot less fair than seeing taxes increase because your home value has increased too much.
Property taxes go way, way back in history. They were already an old thing when this country was founded. Yes, we do have the right.
Some states do have tax caps for existing homeowners and especially for people over 65. I would look to that for a solution to the problem you mention, not getting rid of property taxes altogether.
There's a lot to go into there. First is when taxes in general break God's law. Then you look at property rights that God instituted and that the end result of that taxation is government claiming your property. A good phrase in the Bible to covers a lot of foreclosure for taxes is "the oppression of the poor." The one asset they may have had gets taken from them and they get pennies on the dollar if anything at all. While all taxes may not be theft, the whole basis of property tax is that the end result is government stealing your property.
Whether property taxes constitute oppression of the poor is questionable. We seem to be talking mostly about people who live in places with skyrocketing land values, who could cash in and move to a less pricey location.
No one has to wait until foreclosure by the government before they sell and move, getting only a foreclosure price on the property.
All forms of taxes can be set up to avoid being regressive, or that issue could be ignored entirely and the taxes could be regressive (sales, property, or income). Various means-tested exemptions and reductions can be applied, or not applied. These are government choices, not inherent to the particular form of taxation.
Any tax system that leads to poor economic growth could be a long term oppression of the poor, so I guess we could turn any pragmatic discussion into a religious one.
And as for "God's law" there's no Christian Shari'a. God's commandments are to love Him and to love one another. The complex system of Levitical laws was incumbent on the Jews, but not on Christians and it was heretical (Judaising) to seek to argue that Christians must follow them too. In the New Testament the infant Church rejected circumcision as necessary, and the dietary laws were set aside.
Wow, you're so far off there probably isn't any point in having a discussion. Antinomianism is a sin. We're not only called to obey and given the Holy Spirit so we can obey like Jesus did, but the John books clearly state that if we love God then we obey him. All the O.T. laws that were abrogated like the few you mention and some others we don't concern ourselves with obeying but murder, theft (which is the one that slams property taxes), rape, blasphemy and many others are still in place. Also, it wasn't a complex system of levitical laws, the complexity came from the Pharisees. All the laws laid out in the Bible are derivative from the two greatest commandments. In fact, notice the word "greatest", showing us that there are more.
I'm guessing from this you're in some innovative Protestant sect that dismisses two thousand years of Church history and tradition. OK, sure, but I'm not.
Judaizing was the first heresy and should be avoided. Antinomianism means there are no laws. That's not what I said. I said there is no Christian Shariah. The Church Fathers recognized that civil law was in the hands of civil authoriries, not the Church. And civil law need not repeat religious strictures (We've never made hypocrisy a crime for example)
And none of this has anything to do property taxes.
That's how California does it--high sales tax, low property tax. The result is a housing shortage. With a property tax, people are a source of revenue to the local government, and adding one more house brings more revenue. With a sales tax, businesses are a source of revenue but people are a cost, since they require services. So it's better to discourage housing developments and subsidize favored businesses.
I'll be honest, nothing in your first paragraph persuades me. I do think that valuations can be a problem. Though in aggregate, if government is pushing aggressive valuations uniformly, they amount to a stealth tax increase. And government already has the power to raise taxes.
Assuming the valuation of your real estate increases honestly, then having it go up too much is what we call a "high class problem." There are multiple ways to solve it. You can finance your property taxes with a HELOC if you really want to. Your wealth is still increasing!
Contrast that with the problems of my extended family in forgotten parts of the Midwest: flat to declining valuations. Owning a house in a town that has died and dried up. That's a lot worse than having your wealth increase too fast.
But collectively, rising land values + high property taxes also create an incentive to go YIMBY instead of NIMBY. That has partly been responsible for the success of Texas, which has been responsible for a ridiculously high percentage of America's new housing construction. Which in turn promotes family formation!
Whenever I've looked at the data, Dallas still ranks pretty low for housing price increases, because despite the high demand, supply is largely keeping up.
Aaron just wrote a good piece on gerontocracy. The old are already being subsidized by the young, consuming a vastly disproportionate share of the government's budget. Policies that discourage home construction are another de facto giveaway to the old.
Though all this said, what I object to the most is when low property taxes allow land speculators to sit on land forever. This is the sort of behavior that's most similar to the latifundia, and it should be taxed at a much higher rate than primary residences.
Thank you so much for the links to Greer. Despite my conservatism, I've said for years that we all have to decide the breadth and depth of services we want/need -- and then we have to pay for them. Property taxes are currently the vehicle for that. Furthermore, if you think fewer/shallower services would be okay, you underestimate how valuable the ones we have now are.
I think it is true, re: not being able to go back to the past, but that doesn't mean it's not legitimate or even got roots in terms of Magisterial Protestantism. I myself just came back from a trip to Southwest Texas, where the main options are a bunch of Baptist or Charismatic Churches, Methodists or PCUSA, and a few Catholic churches. For conservative protestants, there's an Anglo-Catholic ACNA church and an LCMS. There's nothing at all for infant baptizing Reformed Protestants that's not a 3 hour drive, so I understand where East is coming from.
However, I disagree with the notion that something can't faithfully express a tradition, even if it's not able to be fully authentic to it due to loss of institutional knowledge. In the context of the church, I'd even more vociferously disagree with the idea that mere chronological heritage alone makes someone a more true bearer of that tradition than a convert trying to seriously incorporate the teachings and history of the past in the present. The deadness of mere traditionalism cannot be underestimated.
In some ways, perhaps profound or perhaps trivial, it's a bit like the difference between someone who visits a country and then brings back a few recipes and opens a restaurant with "authentic" XYZ cuisine vs. someone who intensely studies the cuisine and seeks to translate it for the world more broadly.
With authentic Mexican cooking, the gold standard for authenticity from a foreigner is Diana Kennedy, a British woman whose husband was a diplomat I believe and who stayed in the country after he died. She intensely studied and promoted traditional techniques, ingredients, and methods of cooking. She was also intensely critical of what I'd say the silver approach is of applying traditional ingredients and methods in a modern context.
I'd say the silver standard is someone like Rick Bayless who has a masters degree in linguistics, spent extensive time in Mexico and also tries to incorporate traditional techniques, ingredients and methods, while innovating and using modern or different cooking tools. His work is definitely closer to "appropriation" than Kennedy's but I think still seeks to honor and respect the background, in a way that's recognizable to the original tradition.
In the church context, I think it's accurate to say Kennedy is fairly impossible and closer to the bad kind of LARPing if someone imitates it in church. I think the silver approach is quite legitimate and faithful to both the spirit and letter of the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the Reformation. Just because we can't go back and wouldn't want to go back in terms of living conditions doesn't mean you can't have a faithful expression of the Lutheran or Reformed tradition by an outsider coming in. Publishers are routinely opening up the library of the past by translating or reprinting works from history, and whether someone's a cradle believer or new believer in a particular tradition, they're received with JOY. I witnessed this myself with both cradle and new believers being delighted when Herman Bavinck's works got translated in the early 2000s. For many, it was like opening an entire wing of a house that's been inherited.
In the church context, I really do not understand the dismissal or outright contempt towards those not of a Reformational tradition who are trying to recover what's been lost, especially when so many of the mainline institutions pay lipservice to their heritage while ripping it to shreds through rank unbelief. Throughout Scripture, outsiders who turn to true faith are praised, whether it's Rahab or Ruth, Gentiles and Eunuchs in Isaiah, the Centurion, Syrophoenician woman, or countless others, while the ultra-particular but spiritually empty traditionalists are frequently called things like whitewashed tombs.
I have a lot to say on this issue having been involved at politics at the local level for a long time and hope to make the zoom call. Here I'll just say that Greer is off in a big way because he assumes the only tax is property tax. There is a huge varieties of ways to tax people and the evils of the property tax don't make it one of the best.
Just because Libertarianism is not of the Left does not mean it belongs to the Right. There are many ways to be stupid and Libertarianism is one of them.
One of the reasons the Right has failed for so long has been because of the assumption that world operates as a dichotomy, and that those opposed to the Left must be therefore of the Right.
The core problem for the Right has been setting the limits of membership. Until this issue is resolved we'll continue to be undermined from the inside.
The sort of forced co-habitation of libertarianism and conservatism has been a persistent source of conflict since the founding of the postwar conservative movement.
It's silly to me to think libertarianism has any appreciable influence over actual governance, particularly at the federal level. Republicans made their peace with the New Deal and trillion dollar deficits.
I'm also not sure why it's considered "libertarian" to simply not want to pay taxes but also want to receive government benefits.
I was a cradle Catholic. I never read the Bible, didn't feel particularly close to God, believed that if I left the Catholic church I was going to hell. I was educated by nuns who were more interested in telling us how bad sex was (in both senses of the word "bad") than instilling in us (girls) respect for our bodies and our own bodily autonomy (i.e., help in telling our boyfriends "no." Turns out sex wasn't bad, it was enjoyable.) The meme about boys wanting to date Catholic girls was not a joke.
I left the Catholic Church when I got married. We didn't go to any church until one day (after we had been married about 6 or 7 years) some Mormon missionaries knocked on our door. My husband insisted we join, implying that our difficult marriage would end if we didn't join. The Mormons told me that the Catholic Church was no longer God's religion because of apostasy and that the Protestants didn't have a leg to stand on because they had broken away from God's religion and that Jesus had also come to the Americas before he ascended heaven and that Joseph Smith found golden plates that proved that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was now God's religion. My marriage fell apart and I left the Mormon (LDS) church.
A number of years later my son was attending a Presbyterian Church (the liberal branch) and so wanting to go back to church, I went there. It was good place to be, but I wasn't really looking for God, I was looking to belong somewhere.
So, I've run the gamut. I've been exploring a small evangelical church near me and will likely join it. In order to join, I needed to attend 8 classes in which they explain in detail exactly what they are and what they believe and how it affects what they are as a church. They get right down to the basics in the Bible and don't embellish it with other claims to righteousness or authenticity. They don't try to tell me that I must belong to this specific church or denomination in order to go to heaven, they teach me about God's love and Jesus's sacrifice and that I need to acknowledge Jesus as my Lord and Savior in order to go to heaven. They are not claiming a direct line from Peter, but they are basing their church on the those created by Jesus's disciples following that example.
Yes, their services are a bunch of hymns played by a piano and guitars, a pastor in blue jeans and things projected on the wall. But when I watch the congregants, I see people who are clearly engaged, who are clearly feeling in touch with God. Would I like a little Rock of Ages? Sure, but I can play that at home.
For the first time, I'm working on an actual relationship with God and Jesus, rather than on whether I am attending the church claiming the best credentials. It's early days, but I already feel as if this might be the church for me. Somehow I feel like this might be what it was like in the early days with the Apostles.
Re: property taxes
Ohio is expected to have a property tax referendum soon. Some of my property taxes pay for libraries and parks, things I use a lot and appreciate. At the same time, nearly 2/3rds of my property taxes go to my school district. Another nearly 20% of my property taxes goes to four different social service agencies that serve seniors, children, disabled, and addicted individuals. Inevitably, that will bring more scrutiny for school districts and social service agencies.
With this setup, there is concern among local elected officials of “levy fatigue.” The recipients of our property taxes dollars, school districts especially, need to reexamine their relationships with the taxpayers. The arrogance and we can do whatever attitude has to stop. If it doesn’t, the hammer might come down in a referendum.
Re: donor intent
Interesting to read. I do hear horror stories of what we would call ruling from the grave. However, this might be something looked at for future donors to keep resources out of the hands of folks who don’t have their interest in mind. We’ve seen foundations taken over years later and led to other avenues. In a few cases, non-profits have arguably done acts in a political interest. It would not be surprising to see state attorneys general and local judges pressured to take a closer look at these setups.
I don't see why you say a new nondenominational church cannot go back to being traditional. If some people start using the old Church of England liturgy, traditional hymns, etc., what are they lacking? Why do they have to have a pastor-- one person out of 100-- who has gone to a C of E seminary which by now is entirely heretical anyway?
Traditions are living things. We can't truly go back to living like they did in the medieval era, or in Greece or Rome. There can be a creative encounter with the past à la the Renaissance, but it's not the original article
I sometimes attend an evangelical Anglican church that is very "low" in its general style (drums and guitars, Hillsong-type music with words projected on screens, pastor in jeans, even little plastic cups of what looks suspiciously like cranberry juice at Communion (though I don't commune there). Until recently, you could honestly have attended there for months and not realised you were in an Anglican church. Now, though, the pastor is preaching through the Thirty-Nine Articles, one Article a week. It seems to me a hopeful sign of the church rediscovering its identity.
1. The Amy Grant "steeple-jacking" story is interesting and great validation of the donor intent strategy. I wonder how common this is; not something I've given much thought to compared to Mainline liberalization. This sort of steeple-jacking would be an argument against congregational polity, I suppose. When I saw Grant's name, I thought she would be the villain of the story. But there are other family members involved; hopefully the church will be orthodox. That's potentially an excellent piece of real estate for a faithful Protestant church. The Catholic Cathedral of the Incarnation is nearby in downtown/midtown Nashville and is a beautiful building that I would recommend even fellow Protestant visitors to Nashville take a look at.
2. Protestant LARPING - I'm receptive to some of the arguments about excarnated Christianity, particularly when they touch on something like EO that is so steeped in tradition. But a part of me thinks that this is less of an issue with the Reformed traditions. I'm also reminded that, even in the text of the Bible, I can think of two "LARPing" moments where Scripture was needed to recover a mostly or entirely lost tradition: once under Hezekiah, and once in Nehemiah.
There might yet be a future for more liturgical and denominational forms of Protestantism, though they might also not look like those forms of the past, which were influenced by a living tradition connected to Roman Catholicism that is now fully severed for the vast majority of the world's Protestants.
3. Property Taxes - Greer brings up some good points, though what's missing from this conversation is that property taxes are also, objectively, far more economically efficient than income taxes. This country was built on yeomanry, which allowed for far more rapid population growth than the vast feudal estates of Europe, even in places like Spain during the Reconquista. Property taxes are how you break up the modern-day equivalent of those estates, and it continues to be a way to promote family formation by making starter homes affordable for young families. Texas, famously, has no state income tax and relatively high property taxes, and this has enabled the booming affordability of metros like Dallas. I'm not quite sure how DeSantis intends to fund Florida without property OR income taxes.
2. Protestant LARPING - I'm receptive to some of the arguments about excarnated Christianity, particularly when they touch on something like EO that is so steeped in tradition. But a part of me thinks that this is less of an issue with the Reformed traditions. I'm also reminded that, even in the text of the Bible, I can think of two "LARPing" moments where Scripture was needed to recover a mostly or entirely lost tradition: once under Hezekiah, and once in Nehemiah.
There might yet be a future for more liturgical and denominational forms of Protestantism, though they might also not look like those forms of the past, which were influenced by a living tradition connected to Roman Catholicism that is now fully severed for the vast majority of the world's Protestants.
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[This paragraph relates to American groups.] Ironically, I think Anglicanism is both the biggest and most inherently unstable because it's such a big tent and doesn't have binding confessional documents (at least in practice). American Confessional Lutheranism is currently hitting major demographic declines, but I would not be surprised if Jordan Cooper ends up being either/both the Lutheran R.C. Sproul or Ian Murray (founder of Banner of Truth) and there ends up being a major boost in confessional Lutheranism over the coming decades. The conservative Presbyterian circles I'm most familiar with are generally growing, with both transfer/sorting growth as well as converts. The young to early middle are tending to be more confessional than the older in these circles at the moment.
In their classical forms, all three branches have major foundational points of unity where one can build a serious and recognizable Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed/Presbyterian congregation based on broadly-held texts across centuries and cultures. The thing about a confessional church is that the shared confession is what builds the unity across cultures and where it's healthiest, it's equally as welcoming to the outsider seeking to learn as it is to the cradle believer. It bridges demographics, nationalities, class, and a lot of other things. Something else I'd add is that they're often heavily lay-driven, just as Latin mass is for the Catholics.
Especially if Prayer Book or Reformational Anglicans went about it, the first Anglican Church of the Moon could be established with a Bible and a 1662 Prayer Book. That's all that's necessary to have a vibrant and recognizably Anglican church. For Lutherans, Bible + Book of Concord + a Hymnbook and/or Luther's Church Order would do nicely with just the Bible & Book of Concord being sufficient to start. For Presbyterians or Reformed either the Westminster Standards or Three Forms of Unity, a Psalter or Psalter Hymnal, and either the Directory for Worship or the Dutch Book of Church Order would set up a recognizable and serious Church that would be a faithful representative. As with the Lutherans, a set of Confessional Standards + a BCO/DPW is sufficient. Someone might have to figure out how to chant or come up with metrical psalms and hymns but that would just be culturally different and not fundamentally unrecognizable. The Anglicans only need 2 because the Prayer Book also includes ordination rites and the confession of faith & catechism.
Different types of taxes tax different kinds of wealth. Since not everyone (or every state) has the same types of wealth, it makes sense to tax different kinds of wealth differently.
Income taxes tax income. Capital gains taxes tax investment gains. (Realized investment gains could be taxed as either income or capital gain.) Property taxes, obviously, tax the value of property. Sales taxes tax consumption. In addition, there are user fees (such as automobile licenses).
In my state of Wisconsin, only local governments are permitted to tax property and only the state is permitted to tax income. Both the state and municipalities are permitted to impose sales taxes.
From a local standpoint, it makes sense to tax property because the services the property tax pays for are local: fire and police departments, municipal government, public schools, etc.
Again, in Wisconsin, the state shares in the cost of public schools and provides some aid to municipal governments, and there is an income tax deduction for part of the property taxes paid.
Taxes may be regressive (that is, poorer people pay more than their share; however that is defined), progressive (that is richer people pay more than their share); or neutral.
Most income taxes are progressive; that is, the percent of income that is taxed increases the higher the income. Property taxes are often considered to be regressive, for the reason stated in the some of the above comments: property values may increase out of proportion to the income of the owner and the owner is subject to taxes paid on unrealized gains. Sales taxes are generally considered to be regressive (a point on which I disagree) unless they have some exemptions, such as for food or medicine.
I do not consider that sales taxes are as regressive as they are blamed for two reasons: first, there is a degree of choice in paying sales taxes, the more you buy the more you pay and vice versa; and second, people at different income levels tend to purchase lower or higher cost things. For example, while people of all income levels buy TVs, people with more money are presumed to buy more expensive ones, thus paying more sales taxes.
Whatever kind of taxes are levied must have a tax base. Going back to property taxes, Wisconsin is a tourist state and a significant amount property is owned by out of state owners who pay property taxes to Wisconsin municipalities. That is good for the municipalities. However, that also raises property values which can result in problems for Wisconsin residents who own property in those municipalities.
There is no inherently "good" tax or "bad" tax. Only good or bad tax policy.
>There is no inherently "good" tax or "bad" tax. Only good or bad tax policy.
This is true to a point. The platonic ideal of the worst possible income tax isn't that different from the platonic ideal of the worst possible property tax. At some level, any sufficiently poorly-designed tax is confiscatory and it doesn't make much difference whether income, spending, or property is being confiscated wholesale. All of those represent the state declaring total war against the productive economy.
But if we're talking about well-designed taxes, or, perhaps more importantly, actual taxes in practice in the real world, income taxes (especially corporate income taxes) are the worst for growth, and property taxes are the best. Consumption taxes somewhere in between.
See e.g. here, but I think it's confirmed in basically every major analysis, even if some of the rankings in the middle shift.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/taxation-and-economic-growth_241216205486.html
I agree. Which is why I believe the best tax system uses several tax bases appropriately.
Relying on a single tax places all the burden on a single class of property and thus penalizes one class of taxpayer while privileging another.
Of course the elephant in the room is that while no one is going to love paying taxes, the nastiest problem is spending.
Property taxes can be quite villainous. Someone works their whole life, buys a house, the valuation raises steeply enough they’re forced out of it. Who can plan on a fluctuating tax?
Texas incidentally is not a good example. I have relatives there that are always fighting new valuations. The affordability you mention is also frequently way worse than it used to be. We’re not breaking up latifundia here we’re forcing the elderly out in the name of progress.
Not to mention do we even have the right? Sales taxes make the most sense to me. The state provides a stable safe environment to conduct your economic life so it takes a cut. If you must have property taxes, at least peg them to the original purchase price, that enables homeowners to plan.
As Christians I think we need to be VERY careful about any taxation scheme that could in practice result in seizing someone’s land or home.
Spouting:
> Your wealth is still increasing!
...
> having your wealth increase too fast
In both cases you are referring to unrealized gains. Worse yet, in the scenario to which you are responding ("Someone works their whole life, buys a house, the valuation raises steeply enough they’re forced out of it") there is no increase in *real* value, in *real* utility; it's just too many others with dollars/whatever competing for the same types of property, and the further result that should be appended to "forced out of it" is "you end up living somewhere much less real utility and real value."
The gains are unrealized, but as I pointed out, you can access those gains in advance through finance. If you do the math, you should come out far ahead in any realistic scenario of rapid home appreciation, assuming typical HELOC rates and assuming the range of property taxes that exist in the US (<2.0%).
I acknowledge there's an element here that's unfair, but that's also the nature of property ownership. You can't freeze time. You can't freeze a place in the state you bought into it.
Meanwhile many people buy homes in communities that fall into blight and decay, causing their home equity to be destroyed, which is a lot less fair than seeing taxes increase because your home value has increased too much.
Property taxes go way, way back in history. They were already an old thing when this country was founded. Yes, we do have the right.
Some states do have tax caps for existing homeowners and especially for people over 65. I would look to that for a solution to the problem you mention, not getting rid of property taxes altogether.
You don't have the right if it violates God's law.
OK, but maybe you should explain how property taxes violate God's law whereas other taxes don't.
There's a lot to go into there. First is when taxes in general break God's law. Then you look at property rights that God instituted and that the end result of that taxation is government claiming your property. A good phrase in the Bible to covers a lot of foreclosure for taxes is "the oppression of the poor." The one asset they may have had gets taken from them and they get pennies on the dollar if anything at all. While all taxes may not be theft, the whole basis of property tax is that the end result is government stealing your property.
Whether property taxes constitute oppression of the poor is questionable. We seem to be talking mostly about people who live in places with skyrocketing land values, who could cash in and move to a less pricey location.
No one has to wait until foreclosure by the government before they sell and move, getting only a foreclosure price on the property.
All forms of taxes can be set up to avoid being regressive, or that issue could be ignored entirely and the taxes could be regressive (sales, property, or income). Various means-tested exemptions and reductions can be applied, or not applied. These are government choices, not inherent to the particular form of taxation.
Any tax system that leads to poor economic growth could be a long term oppression of the poor, so I guess we could turn any pragmatic discussion into a religious one.
What does this have to do with property taxes?
And as for "God's law" there's no Christian Shari'a. God's commandments are to love Him and to love one another. The complex system of Levitical laws was incumbent on the Jews, but not on Christians and it was heretical (Judaising) to seek to argue that Christians must follow them too. In the New Testament the infant Church rejected circumcision as necessary, and the dietary laws were set aside.
Wow, you're so far off there probably isn't any point in having a discussion. Antinomianism is a sin. We're not only called to obey and given the Holy Spirit so we can obey like Jesus did, but the John books clearly state that if we love God then we obey him. All the O.T. laws that were abrogated like the few you mention and some others we don't concern ourselves with obeying but murder, theft (which is the one that slams property taxes), rape, blasphemy and many others are still in place. Also, it wasn't a complex system of levitical laws, the complexity came from the Pharisees. All the laws laid out in the Bible are derivative from the two greatest commandments. In fact, notice the word "greatest", showing us that there are more.
I'm guessing from this you're in some innovative Protestant sect that dismisses two thousand years of Church history and tradition. OK, sure, but I'm not.
Judaizing was the first heresy and should be avoided. Antinomianism means there are no laws. That's not what I said. I said there is no Christian Shariah. The Church Fathers recognized that civil law was in the hands of civil authoriries, not the Church. And civil law need not repeat religious strictures (We've never made hypocrisy a crime for example)
And none of this has anything to do property taxes.
"Sales taxes make the most sense to me."
That's how California does it--high sales tax, low property tax. The result is a housing shortage. With a property tax, people are a source of revenue to the local government, and adding one more house brings more revenue. With a sales tax, businesses are a source of revenue but people are a cost, since they require services. So it's better to discourage housing developments and subsidize favored businesses.
I'll be honest, nothing in your first paragraph persuades me. I do think that valuations can be a problem. Though in aggregate, if government is pushing aggressive valuations uniformly, they amount to a stealth tax increase. And government already has the power to raise taxes.
Assuming the valuation of your real estate increases honestly, then having it go up too much is what we call a "high class problem." There are multiple ways to solve it. You can finance your property taxes with a HELOC if you really want to. Your wealth is still increasing!
Contrast that with the problems of my extended family in forgotten parts of the Midwest: flat to declining valuations. Owning a house in a town that has died and dried up. That's a lot worse than having your wealth increase too fast.
But collectively, rising land values + high property taxes also create an incentive to go YIMBY instead of NIMBY. That has partly been responsible for the success of Texas, which has been responsible for a ridiculously high percentage of America's new housing construction. Which in turn promotes family formation!
Whenever I've looked at the data, Dallas still ranks pretty low for housing price increases, because despite the high demand, supply is largely keeping up.
Aaron just wrote a good piece on gerontocracy. The old are already being subsidized by the young, consuming a vastly disproportionate share of the government's budget. Policies that discourage home construction are another de facto giveaway to the old.
Though all this said, what I object to the most is when low property taxes allow land speculators to sit on land forever. This is the sort of behavior that's most similar to the latifundia, and it should be taxed at a much higher rate than primary residences.
Thank you so much for the links to Greer. Despite my conservatism, I've said for years that we all have to decide the breadth and depth of services we want/need -- and then we have to pay for them. Property taxes are currently the vehicle for that. Furthermore, if you think fewer/shallower services would be okay, you underestimate how valuable the ones we have now are.
Off-topic, not sure if already posted: Carmel, Indiana ranked #1 by WalletHub. No surprise to regular readers of Mr. Renn!
https://wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-small-cities-to-live-in/16581
On the "education and health" subranking, it appears to be the top city (almost) that isn't a suburb of Boston or DC.
Yes, another great win for Carmel.